Считаем живых (We Count the Living): новая книга Грега Блейка Миллера

The ghosts of a century hover over “We Count the Living,” Greg Blake Miller’s new novel-in-stories. Following up on the critically acclaimed Russian-language publication of his novel “The Kuleshov Effect,” Miller weaves these tales against the background of an alternative version of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Stories in the form of “intercepted transmissions” bring readers inside the lives, dreams and nightmares of lovers and actors, geologists and spies, emigrants, visitors, rock stars, thieves, tyrants and apocalyptic warriors to reveal a landscape of intense and unfulfilled longing, along with desperate hope. This collage of voices tells increasingly phantasmagorical tales that illuminate the tragedies of our times and introduce the dreamers—often tortured, always striving—who may someday transcend them.

В лице Миллера русские шестидесятники дождались наконец летописца, свободного от главных русских недостатков, и прежде всего от расплывчатости и дилетантизма. Феллини говорил: чтобы снимать безумие, нужно быть очень здоровым. Вот Миллер как раз очень здоров, по-американски добросовестен и экономен. Он скупо расходует слова, точно дозирует эмоции, беспощаден в диагнозах и прогнозах. Его книга читается с тем жгучим интересом, с каким больной, впервые поднявшись после кризиса, вглядывается в зеркало.

In his new novel-in-stories, “We Count the Living,” Greg Blake Miller has written a practically ideal Russian book: Its primary moods are desperate longing, nostalgia, sentimentality, and anxiety, and it’s seeded throughout with mysterious threats. You sense the same audacity as in Russian rock of the 1980s, about which Miller has written one of his finest stories, depicting Viktor Tsoi without resorting to a single cliché of Perestroika. This book is full of doom and freedom, the spirit of innovation alongside romantic timidity, the helplessness of intellectuals alongside the deathless resilience of dissidence. But most notable is that this book was written by the uncompromising hand of an American professional who knows how to catch the uncatchable. In Miller, the sixties generation finally found its chronicler, unburdened by the usual Russian albatrosses, and most of all from vagueness and dilettantism. Fellini once said, to film madness, one must be very healthy. And Miller is very healthy, good-hearted and economical in the classic American way. He measures out words frugally, doses emotions precisely, and is merciless in his diagnoses and prognoses. One reads his book with the same feverish interest with which a sick person just emerging from severe illness looks in the mirror.

Что это – галерея чужих снов? Серия исповедей на Страшном суде? Боюсь сказать «магический реализм», но не раз и не два во время чтения мне вспомнились «Сто лет одиночества».

«Выдуманный мир – тюрьма, если не знаешь, как его переизобрести… Я закрыла глаза и отправилась домой».

Greg Blake Miller’s “We Count the Living” is a remarkable book, the kind you read many times, always discovering something new. It is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read and will surely re-read—so much love, but even more death. These are chronicles of a mad world in which the primary value is freedom, leaving one to ask: Is it really so mad?

What is this book? A gallery of the dreams of others? A series of confessions at the Last Judgement? I hesitate to call it magical realism, but more than once I was reminded of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

“The invented world,” as Miller writes, “is a prison unless you know how to reinvent it … I closed my eyes and floated all the way home.”